Solving first world problems

making it into a worthwhile cause

There are some of us in this world who have an innate impulse and desire to make a difference. We may feel guilty of our sense of entitlement and privilege, so the natural instinct is to run off to somewhere foreign where we can help to build houses or dig wells.

I have a deep-rooted admiration for people who spend their entire lives in worlds much lesser than ours, doctors who give up a life of prestige to serve with Doctors Without Borders, or those who willingly trade precious youth to volunteer for programs like Peace Corps.

I used to spend huge amounts of energy struggling with myself, wanting to be a person who is capable of making an obvious difference. When I have friends trying to fund-raise so underprivileged girls can have a shot of education or the ones who have have full-time jobs but still spend an inordinate amount of time after work to rescue strays; I often find myself asking, “Do I not care enough?”

But I look at myself, and I look at the world around me. I have lived in my entire life in first-worlds, whether it is the country of my birth in Singapore, or the city I love in San Francisco.

Plenty of us can be called to serve in the third-world — these people go because they cannot envision a life worthwhile living otherwise — yet we are not doing justice to the work they are doing, if we do not change ourselves and the world around us.

It is like trying to save a dying branch, without understanding the roots are having problems.

I am not pretending to have answers, nor am I attempting to take the moral high ground. I am trying to ask a question of logic:

How can we truly empower the ones who are underprivileged in faraway lands, when we are hardly effective in empowering the ones who live among us?

By privilege I simply mean those of us are are lucky enough to win the Ovarian Lottery and be born in a country with relative peace and great infrastructure.

We cannot seem to solve poverty in our neighborhood, much less a country five-thousand miles away. We cannot yet figure out how to ensure every kid who lives among us can have an equal shot at a well-rounded education, we have issues with recognizing each and everyone of us as people deserving of equal rights, we don’t seem to be able to feed everybody in the same country with live in, and the ones who have the means to have some form of higher education are living in despair because of the debt they will carry upon entering the workforce.

Those of us who can afford to do so seek therapy, hoping that someone else would give us answers we can barely find in ourselves. We have trouble valuing our rich resources, living in denial of that somebody in some other part of the world does not even have clean water to drink. We are unaware that we are really a part of a greater whole, that all the work we do will eventually start to diminish unless we start seeing ourselves as part of the greater economy.

I love taking Lyft, using Taskrabbit and buying groceries through Instacart, among everything else available in San Francisco. Some of us frown upon these services because they only solve first-world problems, but when I take the time to interact with the Lyft drivers or Taskrabbits, they paint a picture of gratitude and joy — for these services have given them opportunities they never would had.

We forget we still need to look out for those living among us, the young students who have to shoulder expensive loans, the older ones being seemingly displaced by technology. The taskrabbit today trying to earn some cash so that she can take art classes may be the world-changing entrepreneur tomorrow. The elderly Lyft driver may be saving for his grandchild’s college fund. If getting somebody to buy groceries for you is an opportunity of more diverse capital distribution, then why not?

Can we serve in the world we live in? If we can…

• create a sustainable economy which is inclusive of everybody
• find ways to provide great affordable education to those desiring to learn
• support the creators and provide them with tools so they can become problem-solvers or economy-starters instead of spending their energy worrying about survival
• build networks and channels for all of us to express ourselves so we can develop, inspire and branch off each other’s thoughts and ideas
• encourage authenticity and vulnerability — that having emotions and being honest is a strength and not a weakness — so we don’t have to run off to therapists because we are forced to put on masks
• develop a sense of compassion and empathy for those of less privileged because the world we live in can only be truly beautiful if our neighbors can share that beauty too
• make sharing contagious — by sharing among ourselves in the first-world, it will ripple downwards and sideways.

…I would think that solving first-world problems is a worthwhile cause to invest in. I would argue that trying to solve global warming or extreme poverty would be exponentially more effective, if we try harder to invest our energy into the root of the problem:

Thinking of ourselves as disparate individuals without truly understanding the butterfly effect of our smallest actions.